Garbage Soup

Preparing the stock

I read about making stock from vegetable trimmings rather than throwing whole veggies into the pot.  So I've been keeping a gallon bag in the freezer filled with bits of onions, carrot peelings, beet greens, broccoli stems and whatever veggie trimmings we didn't feed to the guinea pigs.  Rob is mildly horrified that I keep these scraps and he refers to the bag as garbage soup.

The bag was filled up last weekend, so I threw the contents in the pot and cooked them up.  The resulting broth turned out a bit on the pink side - must have been from the beet greens.  It smelled wonderful, although it's very dark and slightly bitter.  It's probably not great as a soup base, but it works well in recipes that call for chicken or vegetable stock.  I make half-cup portions by pouring it into muffin tins and freezing it, then dumping the frozen blocks into a big Ziploc bag and storing it in the freezer.  That makes for easy measuring in my recipes:  just pull out the blocks and defrost what I need.